Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Future of U.S. - India Relations

Hillary gives India points to ponder

Deccan Chronicle, July 21, 2011

U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s speech in Chennai on Wednesday, just a day after she held the second India-US strategic dialogue in New Delhi, was absorbing in a way that the official talks were not.

Indeed, if the secretary of state had done no more than dwell at some length on the key points she made in Chennai, especially those relating to East and Southeast Asia and South and Central Asia — and let the senior officials accompanying her engage with the nitty-gritty of the bilateral relationship with their Indian counterparts — the assessment of the second strategic dialogue between the two countries may have been more upbeat.

We can trust senior bureaucrats to mess things up, and in this case Indian and US officials did little to prove us wrong.

The joint statement at the end of the strategic dialogue was a limp affair, clearly failing to capture the spirit of the discussions, while in Chennai the secretary of state informed her audience that in New Delhi she had discussed in depth the key issues she was raising before them.

In her “vision for the 21st century” speech, the secretary of state made no secret of the US desire to forge multi-faceted ties with India because the history of the present century will be “written in Asia”. America’s Asian allies coming down from the Cold War era remain intact.